China No. 1 on 2018 PISA: Is the country really an education powerhouse as the rankings suggest?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. China No. 1 on 2018 PISA: Is the country really an education powerhouse as the rankings suggest?
Siyi Zhang, JMDedu, 2020/01/03
The answer to the question in the title is "no", though the story doesn't explicitly say so. The tests were from a total of 12,058 students from 361 schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z), a small fraction of the total student population. As always, "socio-economically advantaged students outperformed disadvantaged students," so what we have here is a sample of the wealthiest students in China's wealthiest cities. Now this sample, and this population, is nothing to be disregarded - it is equivalent to the entire student population of other countries.
Meanwhile, in the JMD article, there's a lot of expression of discomfort with the results even taken at face value. China's education system ranks among the least 'efficient' (ie., it is supplemented with a lot of time spent learning outside school). The students' "satisfaction with life" ranks near the bottom. More...